Writing--Not an Autobiography

All writers write from their life, not about their life, that is unless you are a memoir writer. And memoirs, I've always felt, are some of the best fiction out there on the market. I think writers, when working on something that is supposed to be biographical, will exaggerate for dramatic purposes, not concerned how the obfuscation may alter the situation as it had truly occurred. In contrast, I think fiction writers reveal more of themselves emotionally in their writing, feeling a freedom that the guise of fiction allows.

I don't think a great deal about how much I reveal myself in my work. There can be no censor for any artist to create and writing is a method for me to figure out the truths of my life. It is a way, consciously, to connect the dots that seem to swirl around me. I can't worry about how something I write will, or can, affect those around me, particularly my family. My husband has had to contend with the reality that a portion of our life gets revealed either explicitly in language, or worse, in the emotional tone of how something is written.

I doubt I'd ever want to write a roman a clef, skewering those that I find incomprehensible, or worse, reprehensible. The pettiness of doing something like this has never interested me. And most people I find so loathsome don't deserve the creative efforts and endless hours that a book requires in the creation and in the fine tuning.

I am hard at work on this revision of my novel. As when I had written the original draft of this book some of the passages are incredibly sad and painful. There are times when I've reread or worked hard at a passage that the emotional weight of what's on the page hits me hard and I am sobbing, literally, my face buried in my hands. This book is not a factual rendering of everything in my life, but it is more of an emotional diary of something that I had experienced. It is as if I had stuffed all the pain and grief of my estrangement from my parents into this one book. And perhaps that is why I was able to deal with this incredibly painful situation. True, I wrote this book long after my parents and I had started the process of healing and forgiving. But instead of letting the residue of this painful episode cloud our relationship, I was able to put the grief of this period into a book. It is these 300 some pages that bears the brunt of the emotional morass of the pain that families can inflict upon one another.

When I had finished writing this book, a book my father had encourage me to write, I let him read the first chapter. I waited for his response, unsure how he would respond. I know it must have been painful for him to read those thirty some pages, but he never once discouraged my work. He said it was beautifully written and left it at that. I know when people read this book, they will read is as biography. When in truth, the realities of any writer's life gets fractured in their work. The voice of a writer is where the truth lies. And trying to decipher that is an impossible task, even for the most experienced reader.

I'm now living inside this book, easily distracted by ideas, thoughts, that occur throughout the day. As painful as this book was to write, I now have the distance of time to see what I was able to create from something that may have brought others to their knees, or worse, made them embittered.